Hermit crabs don’t make their own shells. They scavenge their homes. And now, hermit crabs are facing a housing shortage as the worldwide shell supply is decreasing. With a shell shortage, hermit crabs around the world are being forced to stick their butts into bottles, shotgun shells, and anything else they can find. This is not acceptable. As a community, we can reach out to this vulnerable species and offer our digital design skills and 3D printing capabilities and give hermit crabs another option: 3D printed shells.

One of the challenges is that no one knows yet if hermit crabs will live in man-made plastic shells. And if they will, what shell designs would make the best hermit crab homes. Makerbot is setting up a hermit crab habitat in their factory to test shell designs shared by the community.

This is an ingenious crowdsourced intervention, and I encourage you to check it out (follow the #SHELLTER tag Twitter). But, a thought - how about we stop destroying hermit crab homes in the first place? Isn't putting too much plastic stuff in the ocean part of the problem?

UPDATE 10/25:

Some clarification from the Makerbot folks brought up from comments below:

The final shell material has yet to be determined; plastic is being used for prototypes

No printed shells have been distributed in the wild

The goal is to create a printable hermit crab shell for domestic (aquariums) use thus reducing harvesting of natural shells